One more thing to see to.
She returned to Liberty’s Torch, powered up her voice recorder, and dictated a brief message.
“This is Althea Morelon, mistress of interstellar vessel Liberty’s Torch from Hope, approximately eleven light-years out toward the galactic rim. I’ll be returning to Hope in just a little while, to tell my compatriots all about your society. I expect my reports will make them very angry. I expect that they’ll decide to do something about you...and that the time you’ll have to brace yourselves for our next visit will be a lot shorter than you’d like.
“As you can see, I’ve returned your sentinels—excuse me, your gaolers to your loving arms. Don’t treat them too harshly. They did their best. They just didn’t reckon with having to face a Morelon. Anyway, try to smile about it all. I’m leaving you a present. Before I depart your system, you’ll have the same interstellar potential I’ve contrived for us of Hope. Think you’ll be able to make use of it without the help of your menfolk?
“That’s all for now. Althea Morelon signing out.”
She transferred the recording to a memory cartridge, returned to the reentry craft, and tucked it into a pocket of Efthis’s coverall. As she made to leave, Vellis looked up at her and whimpered.
“Sorry, fella,” she murmured. “I can’t do a thing for you. Maybe we’ll be back to help your kids, some day.”
She stepped out of the hatch and closed it behind her.
* * *
When Liberty’s Torch’s sensors showed the reentry craft to be safely beyond Efthis’s station, Althea seated herself at the command console and strove to compose herself for her next moves. She checked the ship’s tanks of reaction mass, did a swift mental calculation, reached for the reaction drive igniter, and took a deep breath.
It had to be Loioc men who built this abomination. The women would never have dared. The dangers of large-scale construction in space are far too great. They probably used collars like the one Efthis threatened me with to compel them to comply.
But were they derationalized creatures like Vellis, or were they intact men? If the former, how could they have coped with the complexities? If the latter, what did the women promise them for their cooperation? A homeland of their own, where they could live as they pleased to their dying days? Or a privileged status of some sort among their derationalized brethren?
Her thoughts veered toward an even less pleasant subject.
An isolated group of genes responsible for sentience? Just one group that can be removed without damaging the rest of the genetic code? Not bloody likely. I should have probed for more details. What did the excision of the sentience constellation do to the rest of the male physiognomy? Was their strength reduced? Their dexterity? Their endurance? Their lifespan? What sort of process did the “great geneticist” go through in deciding that the tradeoff would be worthwhile?
She tried to imagine Martin reaved of his intellect and reduced to a well-conditioned slave. To a mindless, soulless thing, good only for what his sinews could do and his heart and lungs could endure. The thought was enough to revive her fury. It burned white hot at the center of her soul—a soul whose reality she could no longer doubt, a soul uniquely and indissolubly hers beyond any possibility of separation.
Only a part of her in direct contact with the moral laws of the universe could have flamed into such righteous rage.
What right did they have? How on Hope—strike that; how in the galaxy did they convince themselves that this was their prerogative?
Women have been civilizing the men of Hope for thirteen centuries. We’ve never needed to geld them. They’ve fought no wars. They’ve taken no slaves. They’ve erected no States, which is where all the other horrible ideas always came from. Maybe doing it our way, with love and devotion and lives filled with family and enterprise and riches, just seemed to the Loioc women like too much work.
The more fools they.
Another unpleasant possibility rose to bedevil her.
Will the menfolk of Hope burn as fiercely as I do over this obscenity, or will it fall to Clan Morelon to arrange vengeance and salvation for their cousins on the world below?
Will it fall to me?
It doesn’t matter. If no one else will lead the expedition, I’ll do it myself. Strike that: I’ll do it, period. I’ll craft the warships, invent the weapons, and build the armada. I’ll train the leadership cadre and inspire the troops. I’ll bring the hammer of vengeance down on these arrogant bitches. And I’ll make a thorough job of it.
She engaged the reaction drive, opened the exhaust baffles wide, sent power to the attitude jets, and slowly circumnavigated the station.
She bathed the Loioc space station from end to end in the fusion plume. The station was tough; it had to be to accept, contain, and direct the energies required for its duties. But it wasn’t nearly tough enough to resist temperatures kindled in the heart of a star. Within minutes, the shell of the station had softened and turned to slag. The shell and all its contents were no more than plasma shortly thereafter.
It never occurred to you that a mere female might have a little violence in her soul, did it, Efthis? Enough to deal with you and turn the door of your jail cell into a cloud of incandescent gas? Enough to return with a fleet of ships and weapons sufficient to deliver your menfolk from bondage and treat you and your sisters to the fate you’ve earned?
In time, bitch. In time. I have a little more physics to do, and a lot more planning. But I’ll be back. With a fleet and a gaggle of angry companions...some of them women.
When she could see that the destruction was complete, Althea nodded in satisfaction, damped the main drive, constricted the exhaust baffles, pulsed the attitude thrusters to reorient the ship for system exit, and headed for the cometary belt to top off the ship’s reaction mass tanks.
When Liberty’s Torch had ingested enough cometary ice to bring her reaction-mass reserves to maximum, she went to high thrust and swiftly left the last objects in the outer system well behind. A few hours later, the densitometers declared that the vacuum was thin enough to go superluminal. She disengaged the reaction drive and briefly contemplated the return journey.
An elaborate procedure was required to prepare the ship for an automated return to Hope system. She’d allowed for the possibility that it might be needed and had designed the necessary control linkages and software to make it possible, but of course had never tried it out.
No help for it. As soon as I’m under superluminal drive and properly headed up, I’m getting into the medipod. With luck, it will find the nanites and strain them out of me. Without...God, be with me.
She had to be certain she’d been thoroughly purged of them before she would allow herself to return to the surface of Hope.
==
Chapter 32
Althea’s medipod brought her slowly to consciousness as Liberty’s Torch’s proximity alarms sounded around her. As her senses and coordination returned, the pod hatch swung open. She climbed out tentatively, uncertain of the reason for her revival.
Efthis implied that they’d made a lot of progress in AI. If that damned station found a way to keep me tethered to Loioc system, I’m gonna be pissed.
She went to the piloting board. The ship had dropped out of superluminal drive and was holding station in normal space. She glanced down at the run clock and was immediately relieved. Fifteen months and twelve days had passed since she’d programmed the ship for automated return and climbed into the pod. She lit the lidar system and set it to scanning nearby space.
The returns arrived within seconds. A large mass loomed some thirty thousand miles off the bow of Liberty’s Torch at an azimuth of seven degrees and an ascension of minus two. The returns were consistent with a nickel-iron composition. The viewscreen displayed a spherical mass with a rough surface, about twenty-one miles in diameter. Althea immediately quenched the lidar, activated the communications laser, and triggered the digital interrogator. She grinned as the ackn
owledgement arrived.
I’m home. Well, close enough, anyway.
The Relic was in sight. Eleven thousand miles below it, brilliant in the light from its sun, shone the blue-green glory of Hope.
* * *
Docking Liberty’s Torch to the Relic proved more difficult than Althea expected. It wasn’t a shortcoming in the control system but in her unexpectedly slow fingers and fuzzy sense of touch. Her orientation and balance were off, as well. Apparently a year and a half enclosed in a medipod wasn’t something from which one should hope to rise in perfect starship-piloting trim.
When the mating collars had finally reconciled their differences and the starship’s flexosteel grapples had pulled it snugly against the portal, she scanned the airlock gauges, found no deviations from nominal operation, and popped open the inner hatch. The faint hiss of the pneumatics as the hatch retracted was more reassuring than she would have expected.
I agonized over subcontracting that subsystem. Martin told me I should have more faith in my fellow man. I suppose he was right, but it wasn’t as easy as he made it sound.
The coupled system on the Relic responded equally smoothly. Her orbital workshop was perfectly silent. Other than a faint mustiness to the air, there was no sign that anything had changed for the worse during her absence. She staggered to the control chamber, brought the satellite’s systems out of standby with the flick of a switch, dialed up the air scrubbers, and smiled at the peaking whine of the auxiliary circulators.
There’s no place like home.
The Relic was as much of a home as she’d known for nearly a decade. As much as she missed Martin and Morelon House, it was absurdly comforting to find the niche she’d carved out of the nickel-iron satellite intact and ready for her return.
Well, why should it have fallen apart while I was away? Unless there’ve been big changes down below, no one but Martin can get up here just yet. And it’s not like the solar array or the reactor in the core were going to stop working. They didn’t, anyway.
Even so, she yearned to return to the surface of Hope. The longer she allowed herself to think of it, the more eager she became to have Hope’s gravity tugging at her, her husband’s arms around her, and her grandfather’s silent voice in her head.
The Loioc are fools and worse. Nothing in this universe compares to the love of a whole, intelligent, capable man. Except maybe a clanful of them.
I hope Martin, Patrice, and Doug have been careful with my money. Liberty’s Torch has to be made to go a lot faster if I’m going to make it to Earth and back in less than a decade. Or see much of the rest of the neighborhood.
The urge to board Freedom’s Horizon immediately and head straight back to Jacksonville rose near to overpowering. She forced it down with a will.
First order of business is getting all the way back into shape. I’m not going to risk a re-entry with my eyes and hands this sloppy or my balance this wobbly.
The surprise Efthis had sprung on her came immediately to mind. It occurred to her that a Hallanson-Albermayer medipod, as capable as it was, might have been overmatched by the Loioc geneticists’ nanoengineering. It had never been tested against an intelligently designed artificial organism whose designers intended it to be impossible to eradicate.
I have to make sure I’m completely free of those damned things. I can’t return to the surface until I’m sure. Come to think of it, I can’t have any visitors until I’m sure, either. At least, none that would like to return home.
I could be up here alone for a while. Doesn’t mean I can’t use the radio, though.
She powered up the radio, checked the alignment of the antenna, dialed in Morelon House’s domestic frequency, and keyed the microphone.
“Anyone in Morelon House, please reply. This is Althea Morelon, in sperosynchronous orbit eleven thousand two hundred thirty miles above you. In case it’s not immediately obvious, I’m back and looking forward to coming home and seeing you all again.” She paused as a surge of emotion passed through her. “Could someone please bring my husband Martin to the mike?”
She released the key and waited. No response was forthcoming. She waited another minute before repeating her call, releasing the key, and waiting some more.
Althea repeated the hailing pattern, with minor variations in wording, six more times against a swelling torrent of directionless fear, before a response arrived.
“Hello, Althea, and welcome home. We’ve missed you terribly. This is Dorothy. Martin can’t come to the radio. He’s in his medipod, barely alive.”
“What?” she screamed into the mike. “What happened to him, Dot? What’s going on down there?”
“Multiple projectile wounds. Weaponry we’ve never seen before.” Dorothy Morelon uttered a strained, half-choked sound. “Morelon House is under attack.”
==
We will return to Hope, the Relic, Althea and her kin in Freedom’s Fury.
About the Author
Francis W. Porretto is an engineer, fictioneer, and commentator. He operates the Liberty’s Torch Website (http://bastionofliberty.blogspot.com), a hotbed of pro-freedom, pro-American, pro-Christian sentiment, where he and his Co-Conspirators hold forth on every topic under the Sun. You can email him at [email protected]. Thank you for taking an interest in his fiction.
Freedom's Scion (Spooner Federation Saga Book 2) Page 32